Gloria Vendramini

In early 1990, when she was one of the biggest pop stars in the world, Gloria Estefan suffered a broken vertebrae when her tour bus was struck in an accident, and her miraculous recovery from that near tragedy greatly informed her successive album, Into the Light. Though often noted as a "comeback" album, that descriptor is misleading. Yes, Into the Light is a comeback – a comeback from her accident, that is. It's not a comeback in the sense that her previous album, Cuts Both Ways, had been a failure or even a disappointment. No, Estefan hadn't fallen off, so to speak, with that album. Quite the opposite. It was a monster hit, breaking into the Top Ten and scoring a couple of high-charting ballads: "Don't Wanna Lose You" and "Here We Are." It also marked a drastic shift away from the unabashed dance-pop of her Miami Sound Machine output toward a more respectable adult contemporary appeal. This shift affected not only her image but also her audience as a result, and that shift is even more apparent on Into the Light. In fact, the shift seems complete, as this is full-fledged adult contemporary album with serious themes and toned-down production.

Released just after Cuts Both Ways and a year before her Greatest Hits compilation, Exitos de Gloria Estefan rounds up the key highlights among the singer's Spanish-language recordings for Sony Discos. Expected inclusions like "Conga" and "Don't Wanna Lose You" are here, of course, albeit in Spanish (though "Here We Are" is oddly here in its Portuguese version). More notably, however, Exitos de Gloria Estefan also rounds up unexpected inclusions, some of which never had English-language hit counterparts. "Renacer" is a remake of the title track from Miami Sound Machine's debut album from way back in 1977, for instance, while "Dingui-Li Bangui" is a wonderful song that will be new to most English-language-inclined listeners. And too, the English-language "Dr. Beat" is a welcome inclusion, for it's a catchy and fun dance-pop song from 1984 that was unfortunately left off the Greatest Hits collection. Most of Miami Sound Machine's less commercially successful albums remained out of print for years, so Exitos de Gloria Estefan is one of the few relatively available albums featuring these songs.

It takes only 20 seconds of rhythmic rapture on “Samba” before a familiar melodic refrain emerges. Not long thereafter, Gloria Estefan’s distinct voice cuts through and reveals the self-referencing interpolation at play, a culture-blending revival of Miami Sound Machine’s 1985 smash “Conga”. Such boldness sets BRAZIL305, the 13th studio album of her decades-long career, off to a truly memorable start. With a titular portmanteau that perfectly encapsulates its contents, the project bridges São Paulo with Miami in riveting fashion. Fan favourites from her bilingual catalogue like “Get on Your Feet” and “Rhythm Is Gonna Get You” transform here with fresh instrumentation that maintains the pop majesty of the original versions. Estefan doesn’t limit the reinterpretations to her own work, providing inventive takes on tracks like Maria Rita’s “O Homem Falou” in both English and Spanish.

A collection of 18 of Gloria's hits including 'I Will Survive' and more…

Although 1979's "I Will Survive" is Gloria Gaynor's most famous recording, it was hardly her first. In 1975, the singer established herself as one of disco's early divas with her debut album Never Can Say Goodbye, which dance club DJs went wild over. With side one of this LP, Gaynor helped to popularize the art of the nonstop dance mix, a concept that was still alive and well when the 21st century arrived 25 years later. There are no breaks between songs on side one; the intoxicating opener "Honey Bee" segues into Gaynor's hit remake of "Never Can Say Goodbye" and that Clifton Davis gem (which had been recorded by the Jackson 5 and Isaac Hayes in the early '70s) segues into a stunning interpretation of the Four Tops' "Reach Out, I'll Be There." Put those three gems together and you have a nonstop 19-minute dance mix that thrilled the club DJs of 1975 to no end. Meanwhile, side two isn't as club-driven; all of the songs are under four minutes, and there are breaks between them. In other words, side two is more typical of R&B LPs from the mid-'70s.

This 2004 survey of modern settings of the medieval sequence Stabat Mater Dolorosa is part of conductor Marcello Viotti's project to record the little-known but worthy sacred works of the twentieth century, in conjunction with the Munich Radio Orchestra and the Bavarian Radio Chorus for their concert series Paradisi gloria. The four works by Francis Poulenc, Karol Szymanowski, Krzysztof Penderecki, and Wolfgang Rihm are dramatically different in conception and musical content, and may be regarded more as reflections of personal faith than as practical works for ecclesiastical purposes.